About Salah el Moncef
Salah el Moncef is a writer, scholar, editor, and painter whose work moves between fiction, critical theory, visual culture, and the histories carried by displaced lives. Born in Kuwait City and based in Nantes, he writes across the Mediterranean, North Africa, Europe, and the Arab diaspora.
His fiction is distinguished by its attention to memory: not as a secure archive, but as a troubled medium in which private loss, colonial history, and exile continue to act.
Memory, history, and the diasporic imagination
The Woman from Warsaw (2026) returns to Benghazi under Italian fascism and during the Second World War through Mariam Khaldoon’s belated testimony. The novel expands the world first explored in Benghazi, bringing friendship, family loyalty, Jewish–Arab relations, and colonial violence into an intimate historical narrative.
Earlier works include The Offering, a psychological novel of fractured memory, grief, and diasporic life; Now and Then, which brings fiction and critical reflection together; and the short work Sleepwalking.
Literature, philosophy, film, and visual culture
At Nantes Université, Salah el Moncef is Reader—Maître de conférences hors classe—in English and Creative Writing. His scholarship ranges across contemporary literature, philosophy, film, diasporic and transnational studies, and visual culture.
He is a five-time Fulbright scholar and a recipient of the Presidential Award for Excellence in the Humanities.
General issues, curation, and theoretical work
Salah el Moncef has served as General Issue Editor of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities since 2008. His editorial work forms a sustained chronology of General Issues and extends into the visual field through Art Curated for Angelaki.
His Art as Pharmakon dossier brings trauma, terror, healing, and the image into a single theoretical constellation.
Painting as another form of writing
The Studio gathers recent paintings, the Saharan Rock Paintings, continuing visual series, and the complete developing history of art curated for Angelaki. The paintings are presented as works in their own right, with precise attribution and publication links where those links exist.
Essays in serial, illustrated form
The Notebook opens longer critical works to the web in carefully structured, illustrated entries. Notes on the Question of Evil begins with Sade and continues through literature, cinema, philosophy, and the modern political imagination without sacrificing conceptual density.